Lead Product Software Engineer

Department/Group Overview

Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology Technology is at the heart of Disney’s past, present, and future. Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology is a global organization of engineers, product developers, designers, technologists, data scientists, and more – all working to build and advance the technological backbone for Disney’s media business globally. The team marries technology with creativity to build world‑class products, enhance storytelling, and drive velocity, innovation, and scalability for our businesses.

We are Storytellers and Innovators. Creators and Builders. Entertainers and Engineers. We work with every part of The Walt Disney Company’s media portfolio to advance the technological foundation and consumer media touch points serving millions of people around the world.

This role is critical to advancing a more unified and scalable content acquisition and distribution pipeline across Media Services, Ordering & Fulfillment, and direct‑to‑consumer platforms. As Content Platforms continues to streamline workflows, this position will serve as a technical leader operating across team boundaries—designing integrations and delivering new product capabilities that enable modern media workflows and support growth in both DTC and transactional lines of business.

We are looking for a strong individual contributor with deep technical expertise who can independently drive solutions from concept through delivery. The role requires ownership of release management practices, ensuring reliable and efficient delivery across services, while also leveraging AI to accelerate innovation in production systems and improve developer productivity.

• Provide technical guidance and evangelize best practices.
• Maintain a deep understanding of our core media systems and how they interact with upstream and downstream dependencies.
• Contribute and review code, set standards, and work with engineers to ensure product and design specifications are met.
• Responsible for fundamental platform performance, scalability, and resiliency.
• Partner with stakeholders to refine requirements, and propose solutions to problems that span multiple teams.
• Influence and contribute to department technical strategy and planning.
• Provide mentoring to engineers on advanced technical issues.
• Research, learn, and evangelize widespread adoption of new technologies and architecture patterns.
• Lead cross‑functional troubleshooting of complex issues as needed.
• Strategic planning and vision focused on experimenting with and deploying new technologies.
• Any other duties needed to help achieve Business Objectives.

• Proven expertise with architecture and delivery of high volume, cached, fault tolerant, multi‑threaded scalable systems.
• Deep understanding of async programming models (events, callbacks, etc).
• Expertise designing APIs and building RESTful services.
• Mastery in Java and experience with multiple open‑source technologies like Spring, Tomcat, Nginx, Elastic Search, Mongo
  
  DB, Graph
  
  QL, etc.
• Highly knowledgeable in cloud‑based technologies such as AWS EC2, SQS, S3, Lambdas, Dynamo
  
  DB, Elasticsearch, Cloud formation/Terraform, etc.
• Expertise with full lifecycle of application development, including best practices of unit testing, code reviews, documentation, etc.
• Experience with build and deployment technologies such as Jenkins and Docker.
• Motivat…